Ethnographies of Power

A Political Anthropology of Energy

Tristan Loloum, Simone Abram, Nathalie Ortar, Tristan Loloum, Simone Abram, Nathalie Ortar

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789209808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.

1

Southern Spectrums

The Raw to the Smooth Edges of Energopower

Raminder Kaur

I love to dance in tune with the beat of drums and good music. But now I dance with all my energy to the tune of songs like ‘Velkave Velkave Anukulaye ethirku makkal poraattam velkave…’ [‘Win, Win, People’s power against nuclear power’] that a brother from Kudankulam village made against the KKNPP [Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant]. It fills my mind with the determination that on no account should the plant be established here or anywhere in the world. If I can stop the plant with my legs and hands, I will keep on dancing forever so that the world will not see any more Chernobyls, Fukushimas, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think that there is enough knowledge in the world to decide to stop this.

—Cited in ‘With Love from Idinthakarai’, 8 August 2012¹

This is the view of Ignatius, a young boy from a coastal village called Idinthakarai in the peninsular region of the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. He was caught up in the struggle against a nuclear power plant in the neighbouring village, Kudankulam, that saw its acme from 2011 to 2014, with thousands of people protesting against the development only a couple of kilometres from their homes (Figure 1.1).

Ignatius is one of the more confident and outspoken of the children who reside in the village. Others too joined him in the chorus – girls and boys, women and men, from coastal, rural and urban locales across the nation, especially those based in regions where other nuclear reactors had been earmarked for construction. To a greater or lesser extent, support also extended to international circles, despite the fact that there were national security hurdles among other limitations when mobilizing ‘transnational activist networks’ (Edelman 2001) on the nuclear issue (Kaur 2019).

Figure 1.1. Idinthikarai village next to the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu, India. © Raminder Kaur.

For many of those based in Idinthakarai, their struggle was not specifically against electricity or development, nor was it merely a symptom of a ‘not in my back yard’ (NIMBY) sentiment. Rather, their appeal was for a less costly, environmentally damaging and potentially dangerous form of electricity production and distribution that was complementary to their lives, rather than the authoritarian conduct, regulations and militarization that accompanied the construction of a nuclear power plant.

Boyer makes an incisive and influential proposal about the need to highlight the politics of electricity in contemporary social analyses. He affirms that ‘[e]lectropolitics infuse governance’ (Boyer 2015: 534) when discussing how electricity informs modern subjectivities – in a neologism, energopower (Boyer 2011). He elaborates: ‘modalities of ‘biopower’ (the management of life and population) today depend in crucial respects upon modalities of energopower (the harnessing of electricity and fuel) and vice versa’ (Boyer 2014: 309). In the process, energy and related infrastructures become imbricated in subtle, smooth and what become rational forms of capillary power. However, Boyer appears to overlook the fact that in the Global South, we continue to have a case of modern governmentality entwined with more direct and authoritarian government that follows on from colonial regimes. The hangover of British imperial control layered with a promising democratic constitution and new procedural mechanisms to do with transparency and accountability are the hallmarks of the postcolonial Indian state. Its particularities owe to the exclusionary mechanisms of colonial government, an apparatus that has carried over into the contemporary era in what has been termed by Alavi (1982) as an ‘overdeveloped state’. This has come with ‘a twilight zone of multiple, indeterminate configurations of power and authority’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2006: 302) that draws upon the colonial conjunction of brute force, despotism and lawlessness, along with the exercise of liberal ideas about rights and the rule of law that developed in India in response.

Such circumstances raise my main contention: energopower, as Boyer and others have proposed, is overly derived from Foucault’s (1991) proposals for modern biopolitics.² Thus conceived, it applies more to urban and metropolitan populations far removed from sites of electricity production. By metropolitan, I refer to a nexus of ‘grid governmentalities’ located largely in the Global North, but also extending to relatively affluent and grid-connected urban centres across the Global South. As Gupta observes with respect to the modern lifestyles of the emergent middle classes in India, there is a strong case to be made for ‘the colonization of their imagination of the future’ by the ‘rich citizens of the global North’ (2015: 566).³ While the notion of modern governmentality applies to the Global North and elite urban contingents in the Global South, it is on its own insufficient to account for the violence and authoritarianism that attends energy infrastructures at other ends of the grid.

Boyer’s oversight with respect to the raw or rough edges of energopower is surprising, considering that the Mexican isthmus of his fieldwork site has also seen the rise of violent tensions and uprisings around the development of gigantic wind turbines (2014: 324–25). The energy produced on the isthmus is primarily to serve industrial corridors and metropolitan hubs in Mexico and across the border in the United States. Their installation has not come without repression and resistance against the marketization and militarization of the region (Dunlap and Fairhead 2014). Such violent contexts appears to be an oversight in Boyer’s theorization, for he is well aware of the political authority of centralized grid systems, just as he is of ‘the rights of indigenous communities, environmental impacts, and resource exploitation’ that have marked the anthropological study of energy (Boyer 2014: 313) and the prospect of ‘carbon modernity’s accelerating death-bringing in the name of enfueling human life’ (ibid.: 318). Indeed, he emphasizes that ‘biopower in southern Mexico is, for good or for ill, an often forgotten partner in the transactions between old and new regimes of energopower’ (ibid.: 325; see also Dunlap 2018a, 2018b).

With respect to the nuclear issue, on the one hand, there is an accentuated collusion between the state and nuclear departments and organizations where both state and atomic energy took on the role of a fetish (see Abraham 1998). Elsewhere, I have elaborated on this unyielding nexus of state-corporate-military power that implanted itself in the south Indian region as the ‘nuclear state’ (Kaur 2013a; see also Jungk 1979). On the other hand, there are discrepant inscriptions on the populace, as Chatterjee suggests for regions characterized by vast economic discrepancies, where the marginalized ‘are only tenuously and even then ambiguously and contextually, right-bearing citizens in the sense imagined in the constitution’ (2004: 38). As a consequence, their views are either suppressed altogether or are only taken on board as a procedural matter with the staging of public hearings where officials record, log and file the hearing, leaving a paper trail as to its evacuated execution (Kaur 2013a; see also Sharma and Gupta: 2006: 13–14).

The strong overdeveloped state is therefore attendant with what could be described as a relatively weak and ‘underdeveloped civic space’ (although this is not to pose civic space in the Global North as the normative standard). Large swathes of the Indian populace are not decreed citizens in the sense of participating in what could be called ‘civil society’ and, moreover, as Chatterjee (2004) describes, constitute an arena of ‘political society’ consisting of subaltern populations such as Dalit (historically known as Untouchable), tribal, fishing and farming communities. Although the rigidity of this civil-political binary is arguable, the sociogeographical extremities of the metropolitan-marginal spectrum are undeniable – a marginal that might be physically located in the urban context, as with slum dwellings, or distantly removed from it in terms of rural, forest and coastal hinterlands. Correspondingly, a manner of provisions including electricity – widely backed up by home-based diesel electric generators when needed – flow relatively smoothly for certain contingents, but not so much for others who are only marginally inscribed into modern biopolitical technologies of power.

Energopower as it applies to the postcolonial state then needs to take on board a more discrepant, twilight character. It needs to be qualified for differentials in the equation between energy and politics as it applies to divergent contexts – a complex that I refer to as ‘southern spectrums’ in the title of this chapter. The diffuse and indirect nature of the grid governmentalities discussed by Boyer both oppose and mask or deflect from a series of direct and authoritarian government exacted on others, the ‘smooth’ with respect to the ‘rough’ or ‘raw’. The spectrums of violence therefore extend along the grid, from governmental dispositions concentrated in the North (aimed at replacing the brutality of physical violence through measures to do with knowledge-making, community management and ‘soft power’) to the ‘raw power’ of necropolitics that is rabid among marginalized and remote communities concentrated in the hinterlands.

While according to Foucault (1991), the modern state organizes and affirms the lives of populations in biopolitics, following Mbembe (2001), necropolitics departs from it by emphasizing the centrality of death to the organization of sociopolitical life. The latter is a return to archaic notions of sovereignty, but, as Mbembe reminds us, pugnaciously continues in the modern era in a relation of dependence. Montenegro, Pujol-Tarrés and Posocco note that ‘necropolitical logic enact[s] a politics of death in the name of vitality that defines which lives are worth protecting and which are deemed disposable’ (2017: 143). In the case of nuclear power plants in India, biopolitics is centred on relatively affluent and comfortable urbanites. Necropolitics marks the marginalized who are deemed incidental and even dispensable to this mainstream narrative – the likes of low caste-class slum-dwellers, peasants, and fishing and tribal communities.⁴

On a related point, nuclear biopower channels Boyer’s ‘conceptual lens’ on energopower (2014: 326) in another direction by highlighting how the science of nuclear energy has entered into the micromanagement of our everyday lives, often invisibly.⁵ Nuclear biopower is not only to do with the provision, distribution and governance of electricity, but also fans out to encompass medical science, X-ray diagnostic applications and studies, agricultural developments, irradiated food and other goods, industrial radiography and building and road construction material. While radioactivity might appear in our natural environment, nuclear biopower is about how it has been siphoned and scattered by specialists of different orders into diverse operations to control and enhance the lives of populations as a purported manageable byproduct of a (national) good. These activities have themselves become normalized with respect to the individual, community and/or country’s growth, power and protection.⁶

Nuclear necropower as opposed to biopower reverses the optics. By focusing on the deathly underside, alter worlds are emphasized (see Pitkanen and Farish 2018). Mbembe (2001) develops the concept not through a focus on life worlds, but ‘death-worlds’ to refer to conditions of colonization, slavery and apartheid in which people are subjected to a status of ‘living death’ under technologies of destruction, or what he terms ‘necropower’. From this perspective, death conditions may emerge by way of technologies that, on the one hand, claim to be life-enhancing, but, on the other hand, can be revealed to be life-destroying (Kaur 2012a). In the case considered here, the supposed smooth operations of nuclear science are disrupted to create death conditions for those who have little to benefit from them.⁷ The project of life enhancement by generating electricity and other goods through nuclear power for metropolitan and industrial hubs comes with huge somatic and political risks for those living around and objecting to nuclear power stations, a deathly biopolitics. So whereas biopolitics is ‘to make life and to let die’ as Foucault might have it, necropolitics is ‘to make die and let live’ (2004: 247). The latter is not an archaic form of government, for it has persisted into the modern era along with biopower. In the Idinthikarai case, the lives of those who dissented were death-dispensable to the life power of urban and industrial needs located miles away.

In the rest of this chapter, I elaborate on postcolonial nuclear statecraft followed by views from the margins rather than metropolitan or state actors, as the latter receive more than their fair share in the coverage of nuclear issues in India. I highlight how fishing and farming communities and allied activists around the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant have become the ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1995) for metropolitan and corporate or industrial interests for more electricity. The marginalized then become the often silenced ‘sacrifice’ to ideas about the nation’s development and progress onto which the raw politics of energy is exacted.⁸ What Boyer’s energopower excludes from its focus is how biopolitics also has its darker underside, where supposedly life-enhancing technologies might lead to a living death when seen from other perspectives. Accordingly, energopower need to be qualified: from Foucauldian notions of governmentality that corresponds most closely with Boyer’s energy politics to more direct authoritarianism in what I have called the raw politics of energy – in an adaptation of both Boyer and Mbembe – necro-energopower with its overlapping modalities of death conditions.

Great Divides

The 1990s marked the rise of a new era in the Indian political economy with the onslaught of neoliberal policies and the rapid growth of transnational/multinational ventures and consumer society. Development projects were also being pursued at breakneck speed as deals were struck up and down the country tied to a larger mission to make India a regional superpower. It was a decade where economic liberalization began to wreak havoc on the lives of the poor and dispossessed, and where the judicial and political system became mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction. Politicizing Energy Anthropology
• Chapter 1. Southern Spectrums: The Raw to the Smooth Edges of Energopower
• Chapter 2. Ecuadorian Amazonia amidst Energy Transitions
• Chapter 3. Nepal’s Water, the People’s Investment? Hydropolitical Volumes and Speculative Refrains
• Chapter 4. Energopolitics in Times of Climate Change: Productive and Unproductive Politics of Energy Infrastructures in Poland
• Chapter 5. The Earth Is Trembling and We Are Shaken: Governmentality and Resistance in the Groningen Gas Field
• Chapter 6. Delving at the Core of Everyday Life – Between Power Legacies and Political Struggles: The Case of Wood-Burning Stoves in France
• Afterword. People Thinking Energetically
• Index